WASHINGTON — The anti-government protests in Iran following the
government’s rigged elections are doubtless a little more than
the “robust debate” among Iranians that President Barack Obama
welcomed during the election. Some of the debaters have been shot
dead. Others have been hustled off to jail. I wonder if this is
an eye-opener for our novice president.
Conservatives have objected to his Laodicean calm in the first
days of the bloodshed. He fastidiously refused to take sides.
Only by the weekend did he come to his wits and call “on the
Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against
its own people.” After that the bloodshed got worse. On Tuesday
he expressed “concerns,” but by then the demonstrators had a
martyr, 26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan, an apparently non-political
singer who was shot dead, presumably by government riot-control
troops, though she was not actually in the protest. The video of
her death has been circulating in media and on the Internet ever
since.
Though the nonsensical Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains the president
of Iran after the disputed elections, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is
the country’s Supreme Leader. Having lost confidence in the
police and members of the street militia, the Basij, he called
out the Revolutionary Guard to clamp down on the protests.
Interestingly, the head of the Guard in the province of Teheran,
General Ali Fazli, a veteran of the Iraqi-Iranian war, refused to
fire on his own countrymen and has been arrested. The Guard
itself is a powerful force in the country, with its own
institutions and considerable independence from the government
and the Rev. Khamenei’s Guardian Council.
Now it seems likely that the Guard will turn Iran into a military
dictatorship, with the Rev. Khamenei slipping into a gray space
somewhere between political power and spiritual authority. Thus,
the outcome for now of the street demonstrations in Iran might
well be what we Americans call the division between church and
state or between mosque and state. Whether this will render Iran
peaceful and an agreeable member of the world community is
dubious. The Revolutionary Guard obviously is full of angry
militants. Perhaps the best that the West can hope for is the
ongoing splintering of the ruling military dictatorship with some
members of the Guard resisting attacks on their countrymen and
others attempting totalitarian control of Iran.
Yet my question remains: Has our sententious new president
learned anything from the unforeseen violent culmination of the
Iranian elections? Frankly, I doubt it. He reminds me so much of
our last sanctimonious pontificator, President Jimmy Carter, who
at first attempted to end the Cold War by lecturing Americans
against their “inordinate fear of Communism.” Then the Soviets
became more aggressive. Finally Carter began the military buildup
that his successor took justifiable credit for. President Ronald
Reagan knew the value of a strong military in support of resolute
diplomacy.
Neither Carter nor Obama has any sense of the linkage of the two,
and now it looks like the Obama Administration is going to cut
back on our military even as the dangers to world peace grow.
At the heart of our new president is, it seems to me,
ambivalence. Within him exist opposite attitudes. What we have
seen during the protests in Iran was not a clear sense of
geopolitics but uncertainty. President Obama had not a clue as to
what to do. His White House aides are actually claiming that his
muddled Cairo speech before the Iranian elections inspired the
young demonstrators. “We’re trying to promote a foreign policy
that advances our interests, not that makes us feel good about
ourselves,” an anonymous Obama Administration aide told the
Washington Post. That is precisely the opposite of the
truth.
Increasingly it is apparent that we not only have a very
unseasoned president in the White House but also a very weak one.
At a surprisingly early point in his presidency, Obama’s program
is in disarray. On healthcare he is under fire from the left and
the right. His Cap-and-Trade policy is in trouble. This week the
Hill reports that “Congressional Democrats are largely
ignoring President Obama’s $19.8 billion in budget cuts.” His
Democrats on Capitol Hill are intent on cuts that he has not
asked for, some of which shave funds for his priorities.
Let the mainstream media purr on about this president’s mastery
of government. My sense is that he is out of his depth. His
dithering over the Iranian protests is but one bloody example.
